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What has WoW done for you lately… well besides Battlegrounds…

[Final Fantasy XI] The game that loves to be neglected is giving you more and more. And they do it without promising it 6 months before release and finally patching it in 6 months after. Looks like Final Fantasy XI is getting more named mobs, and all the yummy items that entails in the next update. These will be quested mobs (to prevent over camping) or instanced mobs that are available through the Chains of Promathia storyline.

From the official site:

The FFXI development team will soon add a slew of notorious monsters! These monsters may be challenged in several areas, and others may be discovered during all-new quests! As if that weren’t enough, brand-new battlefields await, including rematches with formidable opponents from Chains of Promathia! Keep your eyes peeled for this exciting new update!

One eager FFXI player that can’t wait for mid-July!

-ringthree

Don’t Blame The Game

From Corpnews I found this evidence that people are broken:

A thoughtless couple in their 20s who left their four-month old daughter at home while they played Internet computer games at a nearby PC café have been booked by police after the child died.

According to Incheon Police Station on Tuesday, a 29-year-old man husband identified by his family name of Yu and his wife put their four-month daughter in the bedroom of their home and went to a neighborhood PC café at around 4:00 p.m. on May 24 to play the online game “World of Warcraft”.

Time flew by as the couple lost themselves in the game, and when they returned home at 9:00 p.m., their daughter was lying on her stomach, dead of suffication.

Read the rest here.

If it wasn’t an MMORPG, it would be a quick drink at the bar or just running to the store for a “second”. Something is wrong with these people. Something is very, very wrong with these people.

Wake up, real life is happening all around you and you aren’t even living it. Focus on what is important. A game is just a game, it is entertainment. Don’t make it out to be something more than that. Nobody cares if you have a level 60 Rogue, it just does not matter. If you are looking for respect, love, accomplishments, or fame, try life out – there is a lot of room for more good people doing good things. It may seem like you get those from a game, but the reality is that you don’t.

Whatever your obsession is and for whatever reason you turn to it, try to remember what is really important and not let your obsessions run your life.

– Ethic

New update for Final Fantasy coming mid-July.

[Final Fantasy XI] Square Enix posted on the Final Fantasy XI main page that the new update will be available in mid-July. As usual, the update will include new quests, equipment and mobs. It will also include the conclusion to the Chains of Promathia storyline which, if it is handled the way the Rise of the Zilart storyline was handled, may indicate that the next expansion is around the corner. My guess? It will be released with the Xbox 360 version.

The development team is currently working on the next version update, which will include all the usual goodies–new quests, new Notorious Monsters, and various system additions and improvements–as well as the thrilling climax to the Promathia story. Watch this space for the latest announcements regarding update details.

The next version update is scheduled to take place in mid-July.

– ringthree

WoWzors!

[World of Warcraft] Well this explains alot:

A lot of people are leaving, mainly because they feel their hands were tied over WoW. Corporate refuses to put much money into the WoW project, and it frustrates us as much as the customers. When Vivendi forced the game out in November, we literally spent weeks stuck in the office because the servers were constantly crashing. Some co-workers didn’t see their families for a week, sleeping on the floors and couches in the break room. Management was bitching all the time about how much money “we’re” losing.

Many desks are empty now, more and more co-workers are leaving, rumor is NCSoft is promising faster release schedules, and Vivendi not breathing down our necks. The morale is awful, mainly the long cycles for each project, working 4..5 years on something takes a lot out of you, then the massive rewrites because another company came out with a feature we planned to use, or the hardware changed, it erodes you. Ghost won’t be out by christmas, expect it delayed again until summer 06, and the next pipeline project isn’t due out until 2008. It’s expected that WoW will keep the company in enough funds to remain solvent until then. I’ll probably be looking somewhere else, I pity the kids they end up hiring.

This is probably old and recycled news by now, and is credited to a dissatified Blizzard employee, so take is for what you will, but wow.

This along with the news that NCSoft stole Blizzard employees that were working on the first expansion means that all the level 60’s will be raiding Molten Core for quite some time.

Stolen from Slashdot.

– ringthree

Two Million And Counting…

The news is out, Blizzard has surpassed two million paying subscribers worldwide, all playing World of Warcraft. That’s just insane. That’s a lot of money rolling in. Can they handle it? Will they stay on top? Is there nothing left for them but a big crash?

The crash has already started, at least in my little world. Most everyone I know that has played it – including casual and hard core players – has quit playing already.

But still, 2 MILLION PAID SUBSCRIBERS. As Abalieno wrote: “You say that some parts of the game are broken? HA! Two million subscribers. Rimshot.” That is the fact, Jack.

– Ethic

The Wonderful World Of Bugs

I was bored at lunchtime and found this thread on the World of Warcraft forums. Notice the parts I highlighted. It was good for a chuckle anyway.

How can I avoid losing my items in the first place

One current workaround to this problem is to only store Soul Shards in your main backpack, not your other bags. The bug will not manifest itself if you follow this rule. Another suggestion would be to ensure that you are always playing with a lot of empty inventory space.

If any more workarounds to the problem are discovered, I will update this post.

I hope this clears up some of the confusion. Thank you for your patience while we get this issue resolved.

Edit: A better workaround to this problem is to actually not store any Soul Shards in your main backpack at all. Instead, store all of your Soul Shards in your other bags, and this problem will not occur.

– Ethic

Wither World of Warcraft?

[Final Fantasy XI, World of Warcraft] So I actually spent some time playing World of Warcraft over the weekend. I play a human mage, starting a frost/arcane spec. I have gotten to level 16 so far. The question I keep asking myself, is why should I go any further.

I actually want to get to 20. 20 is the lowest acceptable level that I can do the Dead Mines instance. Instances are what really drew me to this game in the first place. In Final Fantasy XI, there are very few instances and they involve just one combat scenario. But the idea of an extended dungeon with goals that must be completed to accomplish the mission has so much intrigue for me. The problem that I am having is actually getting there.

I can’t comment on any more than what I have experienced so far, but so far I just don’t see the overall appeal of the questing system. The quests are generic, and when I say generic I mean, they are all one of three kinds. Thats it. In FFXI, let alone most other games, quest systems are far more advanced than this. The newness of WoW is also no excuse because many other new games have had far more engaging quests from the very beginning. I mean the quests get to the point of being so simple (but not easy) and dull that, at some point, I figure that the NPC’s will just walk me over to the mob that I need to kill and sit there with an “I’m waiting” expression on their face.

I love the idea of experience rewards for quests, because this is more along the line of the original pen and paper RPG’s of yore. You are also not left wanting for equipment or money. This is a good thing, for now, at least. We will see how the economy changes. I just don’t feel compelled to sit down and start playing. I did feel compelled the first few days that I played. It was interesting, learning the battle system, doing (at the time) interesting quests, and exploring new areas. Now that I have done the introduction to the game, I am having trouble finding out when the game is supposed to become intriguing.

I think there is one major thing that WoW is missing, and that is one of the things that is keeping me engaged in FFXI. There is a complete lack of cutscenes in WoW (besides the opening one, but I mean if that is the only cutscene for the entirity of the game, that is pathetic). There is a story to be found if you read the quest givers notes, but there is nothing to make me feel like I am the one that is doing this quest for a specific reason. With cutscenes, your character is inserted into the storyline supposedly as the story is taking place. This is engagement, this is intrigue, this is not “Kill Ten Rats.”

And so I genero-quest onward to 20 so I can try an instance. I have built up instances in WoW to a great level in my own mind, lets hope WoW doesn’t let me down.

Ringthree

New Shiny

[City of Heroes, Guild Wars, EVE Online] This has been an interesting time for in-game new shinies.

A little while ago, I logged on to City of Heroes and just was not terribly interested in doing anything. I had hit the level cap, and I did not have a strong urge to begin the climb to level 50 again. I decided to try out my Kheldian and see how that went. Level 22 is the first time that you can have the best enhancements possible (before end-game raid loot), so it was pretty cool to fly around and two-shot large groups of even-level enemies. I mentioned the glory of Striga Isle and the content in the 20s, so that was great. I flew up 7 levels fairly quickly, worrying more about out-leveling content than about leveling. Actually, I did fly past one of the Striga contacts, but he let me proceed to the next. I re-did the re-furbished Citadel task force on my Tanker, since our group needed one. After that, the shininess just sort of faded. Hmm.

My wife, of all people, expressed an interest in trying Guild Wars. She likes City of Heroes, but the other games she likes all have “Mario” in the title. Still, Guild Wars is pretty, and if she likes CoH… A friend of mine lost interest by level 11 there, so I borrowed his copy/account. Not too shiny; I have played several fantasy MMOs, and for a non-PvP player, there was not too much shine. Level 9 (8? whatever) came pretty quickly, but it is not calling me back. The wife? Logged on twice, didn’t like the controls, and it is too much like World of Warcraft. Yeah, I know, there is a world of difference between the two games, but in the beginning and in the ways that matter to her, they are not too far apart. Besides, if you click on anyone, it looks like you are inviting them to group, and that made her nervous.

Okay, shiny #3: EVE Online. Now this is distressing: we cannot have three bloggers on a site commenting on the same game. Well, maybe we can, but would you, the reader, stand for it? Maybe, since there are differences in perspective. Anyway, EVE Online looks a bit like A Tale in the Desert (deep economy and trade skills, player-run economy) without the developer-run social experimentation. This may or may not be an improvement, based on your perspective. Oh, and prettier graphics.

I suppose there was a point here…one moment… Let’s go with:
Rapid experimentation is fun. Having friends to borrow from is always good, since games can get expensive. Sometimes it takes many shinies to find a prize worth keeping.

At any rate, I have my City of Heroes supergroup, and I have a new corporation in EVE Online. The two games have vastly different play styles, so we shall see if I can stand playing two MMOs at once and still have a life, such as it is. Now if only I could get the sound card to work in EVE without crashing me…

: Zubon

Zxyrox Saves the Day :D

[EVE Online] Well I’m back from my vacation and now that the war is all finalized and done with. I’ll post about the main causes and effects of the war and how it was finalized, and of course how I did my share in ending it. :)

We had war declared on us by a pirate/mercinary corp called Silent Guard, this corp was apparantly hired by another corp in the same system we are in, to take us out. Now we have a few hints as to who the corp is, but we aren’t sure yet and we are looking into it.

Silent Guard is a very small elite corp. Few members, yet they have very high skill counts and very good ships. Over all, we had the advantage, however our pilots weren’t organized well enough to take them. They would hang around our home system and pick us off one by one, we had a few skirmishes but they got away or docked and logged quite often. Therefore we couldn’t get them.

We had a bit of outside help though, from a millitary corp and an old friend of the corp who is the one who pulled us together and gave us the edge we needed to end the war. We had major advantages. One was that we were fighting on our home turf, where we could use Bookmarks and quickwarps to plan our attacks.

I lost overall 2 combat cruisers and 1 very expensive mining barge. Later on, the helper of the corp gave me a 20 million ISK outfitted ECM ship, which he gave in payment for my help with various odds and ends he needed. Later the next morning, him, I and another corp member were on and had spotted one of the Silent Guard in our system. He of course was hanging outside our corp hq waiting for us to come out. Thing was, only the helper was docked. He engaged the Silent Guard member and we warped in after him. Friend in a megathron, me in my blackbird, and the corp member in a scorpion (megathron and scorpion = battleships :) my ship = cruiser). I dampened his sensors resulting in him being unable to target us, and we locked him down with all the ECM we could muster, soon after his ship was dust.

He offered to end the war given we didn’t let slip the loss of his ship, for either he wanted the war over or he didn’t want his corpmates to know he lost a ship. To whatever the cause, he petitioned his CEO to end the war and we got our wish the weekend prior. It’s over and no hard feelings .and we will still try to find the corp who declared war on us. But for now peace is here. :D Anyway, sorry I haven’t been able to post recently. Just had nothing going on except the war and I wanted to keep it on the down-low. You understand, right? :P

-Zxyrox

Battlegrounds Day One

[World of Warcraft] The long awaited patch with Battlegrounds was finally released for WoW on Tuesday. I’ve been playing on the test server so I had seen a lot of the new content before, but it was good to finally experience Battlegrounds with friends on my server (and thank you Blizzard for making wands auto cast). In my last post I had wrote about how all but the most dedicated of players I knew were getting a bit tired of WoW. Those most dedicated player being in large guilds who were basically raiding nightly. Meanwhile, casual players like myself and some pretty diehard players that simply did no join a large guild were running out of things to do. Most of us were stuck doing nightly Dire Maul raids and dueling in front of Ogrimarr.

Now that Battlegrounds is out I take back much of what I said. Although the waits to get in to an instance are long at times, once you get in it is very fun. Even Alterac, which was almost unplayable on the test server due to lag is running well and generally very fun. Most of the people I knew who got bored of the game are back playing Battlegrounds. Yes, there are still many bugs and lots of things I wish they could change, but I think they’ve got me for another 3 months or so at least with this new patch. Hopefully, more Battlegrounds will be release to compliment Alterac and Warsong. However, the preview page indicates that the next big content addition will be the Blackwing Lair raid instance. Not having 40 level 60s in my guild, I will probably never see the inside of that instance.

For the record: I’ve only played Alterac and Warsong once each since they went live. Horde won both times. Now excuse me while I go play some more.

DC